Morality: Evolution’s Winning Gambit

The evolutionary and neurobiological investigations of morality are only just beginning, but they are already shedding light on the contexts that must have shaped our capacity and propensity for moral judgment and behavior, and on the circuitry that generates our sense of right and wrong and compels us to act accordingly.

Moreover, evolution favors hemispheric lateralization, and the lateralization of key moral circuitry has now been experimentally established. Most recently, gender has been recognized as a complicating factor in an already complicated story; morality may have multiple molds, each with its own niche in the proto human environment, differently shaped by natural selection to different ends.

Whatever is left to be discovered, and whichever of our current assumptions are eventually overturned, we can be confident that morality is an integral part of our species’ success, a favor bestowed and favored by evolution, and that its origins are ancient and deeply rooted in the brain.